#OCTOBER 2023: To Catch a Spy: The Art of Counterintelligence by James M. Olson

25 messages · Page 1 of 1 (latest)

kind pulsar
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The results of the Book Club poll are in and since we've done the old shufflearoo and moved books around, we'll be reading To Catch A Spay by James M. Olsen in October.

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spice blade
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Heads up: it is peppered with (literary) quotes to illustrate (sub)headers. For those who want to play guess-the-source.

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subtle olive
outer ocean
subtle olive
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oof

spice blade
drowsy sierra
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Whenever anyone gets to it would love to go over it, but there's a few parts where Olson speaks about specific modern actors against us here in the US, and he notes some and the extent of some that we generally would not think of in that way. There's a lot of really good discussion to be had there in a much wider sense than just the books coverage and has a heavy cross-intersection with CI itself and other fields, since understanding the adversaries own understandings and views is important.

outer ocean
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Robert Hanssen's data is included in the Pipl data breach under the email address hanssen@orion.clark.net

drowsy sierra
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Interesting find

distant onyx
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Hey guys. Do you record book discussions?

spice blade
spice blade
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Reminder that the next meeting is in two weeks.

I misspoke about the time changes! It's the EU people that need to turn up early!

sand mantle
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Ah, I figured out what book I was confusing this one with. The title was "Billion Dollar Spy" and it was about Russian CI against the US, not the other way around. That's where I was getting off-base - sorry all for the off-topic tangent yesterday!

spice blade
pure iron
keen lotus
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I bet that one is good

midnight yacht
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I believe it is, I just finished. Although I am curious about one aspect. I read it after rereading Suvorow's GRU and I am left wondering about the spotlight Olson gave to KGB instead of soviet milint.

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But it very well may be just the way he structured the book. Then again, I would love to have a GRU book version with American intelligence commentary.

drowsy sierra
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They did have remit to run their own operations but they were usually of a different context than what the KGB was doing and much more narrow in focus

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For example something the GRU did a lot, that the KGB did also but not to form, was attending tech conferences to try and actually obtain tech samples. KGB did do this but more for economic purposes and etc, GRU largely did it for military R&D reasons. The specialists on our side working those cases were far slimmer and it'd hit their narrow niche speciality to follow up.

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The other thing they could largely do "alone" was run their illegals, which, rather than for intelligence purposes, were largely ran as covert networks for a potential hot war. There has been a bit written about these over the years but we know so little no ones made a full book about it, and the amount of defectors we have who've spoken on it are a lot smaller than the KGB defectors who dealt with illegals.

When it came to most routine intelligence operations though the GRU was seconded to the KGB unless they did some shadier stuff internally to "hide" it from the KGB. Or there was some cases they openly tried to battle to keep their recruitments or etc and they were given to KGB anyways.

Key here being this was for primary target nations, GRU did have relatively free hands elsewhere, where, Soviet decision makers did not have outsized interest (and most soviet decision makers aligned to the KGB rather than GRU).

midnight yacht
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Great insights and those are stuff I should have already interpreted from GRU book

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Thanks

drowsy sierra
# midnight yacht Great insights and those are stuff I should have already interpreted from GRU bo...

I do think you raise a good point nonetheless, there's too much focus that's been given to the KGB in prior works talking about Soviet intelligence at large. One area this has wonked out is, it is the predominate perception that the KGB, and not the GRU, had the strongest asset networks - this is actually, not true. In periods and areas where they had free hands, their networks were actually much larger than the KGBs, although this is also slightly understandable for different purposes (eg tactical and operational level MILINT collection vs strategic targets GRU would also go after, kind of broadens their overall applicable slate, since they also collected against similar non-mil targets as the KGB did, just generally were forced to hand the output over, or the asset themselves).
A lot of famous known soviet agents in the US, UK, Canada, and other main target nations, were initially recruited by the GRU but KGB forced control over them and "stole" them from the GRU. That gets left out in specific coverage on a lot of individuals and accredits more to the "super KGB" idea when for a lot of those folks KGB didn't actually conduct the spotting or recruitment.